Archive for the ‘Snort’ tag

In an earlier article, I described how to stream captured network traffic to a remote host for IDS analysis with Snort. Mikrotik units can stream captured traffic elsewhere using the TaZmen Sniffer Protocol (TZSP). tcpdump and Wireshark natively decode this protocol, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be supported by any other of the large amount of useful network analysis tool.

The main usage for streaming the network capture is feeding it to the Snort IDS, and for this single purpose (and since Snort can read from STDIN) piping the traffic directly from tzsp2pcap to Snort works very well. However, now and again I need to look at the network traffic without having to detach Snort from the live stream.

This was solved by making the network traffic stream available over a dummy interface with the brilliant tool tcpreplay, to which I can attach any tool that understands pcap. These are the required incantations:

UPDATE: For more flexible streaming, and for not having to hack your Snort init scripts, you might want to consider this article as well. Now back to the scheduled program.

Port mirroring on a strategically positioned switch can be the best setup for an IDS sensor. If that’s not an option, RouterOS-based MikroTik devices support capturing network traffic, streaming it to a remote target using the TZSP protocol. This functionality is available in RouterOS and extended support is provided by the calea package.

Configuring a remote IDS device with MikroTik has been described elsewhere, for instance here and here, but since my plan involved an ARM based Raspberry Pi, MikroTik’s trafr mentioned in those articles could not be used since it’s for x86 only and the source code does not seem to be available. Luckily I found tzsp2pcap which converts the TZSP stream from the MikroTik device into a pcap stream readable by Snort.

My setup

The setup used for this project consists of an RB2011UAS-RM (model is now EOL, replaced by RB2011UiAS-RM) acting as NAT firewall/router, and a Raspberry Pi B+ unit on which I installed Raspbian. The firewall connects to my ISP over a dedicated VLAN, so the outside interface with an official IP address is a bridge VLAN interface named bridge-vlan02-untagged. This will also be the capturing interface.

Note that the traffic capture takes place after NAT, so with this setup Snort will see traffic initiated from the inside as having the official IP address. In other words, you will not see the origin IP address of any suspicious outbound activity.

Compiling tzsp2pcap

Building tzsp2pcap requires the packages git, build-essential and libpcap0.8-dev. Now git clone or download the tzsp2pcap source code. To make tzsp2pcap compile on Raspbian I also had to modify the Makefile somewhat, from

When started as shown above, tcpdump will stop by itself after having received 10 packets. If you see something similar to this, that means that both your MikroTik device and your tzsp2pcap listener are working correctly and you should give yourself a pat on the back!

Installing and testing Snort

Installing Snort is the easiest part: aptitude install snort. After answering the questions during the installation, allow Snort to start. Find out how the process is run:

The above is required since we will not be running Snort in a normal fashion. Now stop Snort, and make sure it doesn’t start by itself at boot:

# update-rc.d -f snort remove

Based on the above findings and your own preferences, including what’s defined in snort.conf and any related config files, you should now be ready to forward the stream from the listener and into Snort. Note the ‘-r -‘ at the end, that’s what makes Snort analyze traffic received on STDIN.

If everything runs as it should, you should start seeing some alerts trickling in. The default log file seems to be /var/log/snort/alert which is nice for debugging and testing. For those somewhat serious about running an IDS, storing alerts to a database will be the better approach.

Maintaining and tuning Snort

Configuring, maintaining and tuning Snort further is a (large) job in itself, and should be customized according to your own requirements. See the excellent Snort documentation for more on this topic.

System loads

With a network usage at around 7-8 Mb/s, the RB2011 uses about 40-45% CPU with traffic capture enabled, as opposed to 10-15% without traffic capture.

The Raspberry Pi B+ running Snort uses almost no CPU in regular use, but about 90-100% CPU with a load average between 1 and 2 analyzing the network traffic during the download. For this purpose a Raspberry Pi 2 would probably be better suited.

UPDATE: A new test with other hardware shows the following loads:

With 7-8 Mb/s throughput, an RB450G performs at about the same load as the RB2011. Replacing the Snort sensor with a Raspberry Pi 2 shows quite an improvement: Where the regular RPi B+ spent all its CPU resources on traffic analysis (load values between 1 and 3), the RPi2 has a load of 10-15% (load values between 0.10 and 0.15).